Christmas always comes early at Churchill, as we hold our Christmas Concert in late November! This year we were back at the Playhouse theatre in Weston-super-Mare, where we last performed Sweeney Todd in February 2020. It was great to be back!
Junior Choir in action
The Performing Arts team have been amazing in keeping music, dance and drama going through the pandemic last year, where there were restrictions on choral singing and playing woodwind and brass instruments. Thankfully, this year those restrictions have been lifted and the team have been unleashed! As a result we had performances from Brass, Flute and Clarinet ensembles, along with Concert Band, Big Orchestra and String Orchestra, giving us fantastic pieces from their repertoire including classical, modern and festive music.
There were also four choirs on the bill: the classical Chamber Choir, our Youthful Spirit gospel choir, the Year 7-10 choir and the massed ranks of the Year 7 and 8 Junior Choir which closed the show. There’s no doubt that the Junior Choir was a great way to finish the night, telling the Christmas story through music (and synchronised actions!) There were some incredible soloists fronting the choir, with Lucy Donovan, Anna Pope, Ella Phippen, Ben Marks, Ben Payne and Joe Armfelt wowing the audience!
The concert also showcased our student leaders, with Peter Skeen (Year 12) conducting Big Orchestra, Bori Gunyits and Miyah Barker (Year 13) conducting the Year 7-10 choir, Toby Wilson (Year 10) arranging pieces for Big Orchestra and String Orchestra, and the highly efficient backstage crew led by Mimi Mendl and Mia Wakeling (Year 13). All of the songs performed by Junior Choir were also composed by our students!
The first half concluded with an early showcase for next spring’s production of Rock of Ages. The stage was fizzing with energy and the double cast gave us a taste of what to expect when we return to the Playhouse between 16th and 18th February 2022 for what promises to be a spectacular show.
A huge thank you goes out to all the staff from the Academy and the Playhouse who helped get the concert together, to the wonderful audiences across the two nights, and to the amazing students who owned the stage. It felt good to be back!
Perseverance is defined as “continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time.” It seems to capture the spirit of our time: our determination to overcome the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, our commitment to battle against climate change, and to heal the divisions in our society. None of these issues have easy or quick solutions, but we know that the reward will be worth the effort.
The Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars, pictured with the Ingenuity helicopter (source)
The Cambridge Dictionary was alerted to the currency of “perseverance” in 2021 because people looked it up over 243,000 times. 30,487 of these searches were between February 18 and February 24, after NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars on February 18. The rover, like Curiosity before it, captures the distinctly human spirit of achieving the apparently impossible: landing a car-sized robot on a planet 380 million kilometres away, and driving it around on the surface. As if that wasn’t enough, Perseverance deployed a tiny helicopter on the surface, which flies around in the Martian atmosphere. It’s called – appropriately enough – Ingenuity.
We can’t help but be inspired by the achievements of the NASA team behind Perseverance and Ingenuity. Although our personal challenges may be more modest than flying a helicopter on the surface of Mars, they are no less worthy or worthwhile. Becoming the best people we can be is not a short or simple task. It takes commitment, effort and time. It requires a “never give up” spirit. This is something we pride ourselves on at Churchill Academy & Sixth Form. It’s why our vision is “to set no limits on what we can achieve.” Because – if we persevere – we can accomplish incredible things.
Remembrance Day is a vital moment for us to call to mind those who have made the ultimate sacrifice so that we can enjoy the freedoms that we have today. During the silence we observe, we all experience an identical minute between the bells, but in our private inner worlds each person has an unknown and unique journey as we reflect on what remembrance means to us.
I always preface the silence with my classes with a little about why Remembrance Day is particularly important to me. I tell them about my Grandfather, an officer in the Royal Navy, serving in the Arctic convoys and captaining a minesweeper, before working on the Pluto programme to supply fuel to the beaches on D Day. After the war he returned to teaching as Headmaster of Grasmere school, where he worked until retirement. Sacrifice is not always about death. We remember the fallen but also those who were – and still are – prepared to risk their lives to defend our society. We can learn a lot from their individual sacrifice for the collective good.
Soldiers in a trench on the Somme, 1916
Each year I display a poem on the board for the students to read if they wish. Some like – or need – a focus for the minute. Previously I have used Sassoon, Owen, and McCrae, but in recent years I have favoured Mametz Woodby Owen Sheers. This poem is so resonant and powerful in its description of the uncovering of the remnants of the battle of the Somme in peacetime as farmers plough. Sheers has spoken eloquently of the inspiration for the poem as he visited the site:
Walking over that same ground, now a ploughed field, 85 years later I was struck by how remnants of the battle – strips of barbed wire, shells, fragments of bone, were still rising to the surface. It was as if the earth under my feet that was now being peacefully tilled for food could not help but remember its violent past and the lives that had sunk away into it. Entering the wood, a ‘memory’ of the battle was still evident there too. Although there was a thick undergrowth of trailing ivy and brambles, it undulated through deep shell holes. My knowledge of what had caused those holes in the ground and of what had happened among those trees stood in strange juxtaposition to the summer calmness of the wood itself; the dappled sunlight, the scent of wild garlic, the birdsong filtering down from the higher branches.
The military cemetery at Mametz
As we remember the Great War it is our duty and privilege as teachers to help the next generation reach back into the collective memory of our violent past and hope with all our hearts for a peaceful future in their hands.
Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers
For years afterwards the farmers found them – the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger, the blown and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel, reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.
This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them, their socketed heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing, slipped from their absent tongues.
The COP26 summit is an opportunity to change the world. Leaders are meeting in Glasgow to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. They will attempt to agree significant actions to reduce carbon emissions, control global warming, and save our planet for future generations. Whether they succeed or not, is out of our hands. But, at Churchill Academy & Sixth Form, we are committed to doing what we can to reduce our impact on the environment, and to improving the prospects of a greener future for our students and those that follow in their footsteps.
Our commitment
We’ve taken the Let’s Go Zero pledge, declaring our aim to become zero carbon by 2030. We know that schools can be the trailblazers for their community, responding to young people’s calls for action. In fact, they can inspire whole communities to tackle the climate crisis. In the coming pivotal ‘climate decade,’ we will be part of Let’s Go Zero’s national network of schools and sustainability organisations, sharing information about how to reach zero carbon, and working with local councils and government to make it happen.
Our ambition
In our aim to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, we will:
Recycle more waste material than we send to landfill
Achieve the decarbonisation of our heating system on site, reducing reliance on gas
Re-invest financial savings from sustainability initiatives back into programmes that will deliver towards our carbon emission target
We will show Kindness to the environment, demonstrate Curiosity when looking at how to do things differently, and practice Determination to make a positive difference.
Here are some of the things we’ve already done:
The built environment
Over the past five years we have transformed the built environment of our Academy. In 2019 we finally demolished the original school building, the 1956 block which was latterly home to Tudor House, Science, IT and Business. The energy-inefficient, single-glazed, concrete building has been replaced by modern, well-insulated facilities including the Alan Turing Building and the Athene Donald Building. Both of these were built with sustainability in mind, not just in their construction methods but as sources of energy generation. The roofs of both blocks are completely covered in solar panels, as you can see in the shot of the Athene Donald Building below:
It’s not just the new builds, either. We have solar panels across the roofs of Performing Arts and Music as well, as you can see in the latest Google Maps satellite images of our site:
We are currently halfway through the complete internal rebuild of the Stuart and Lancaster House building, home to languages and humanities. This includes ripping out and completely replacing all the heating, lighting and electrical systems to run as efficiently as possible, as well as ensuring the building is properly insulated and ventilated.
Hot water
A point-of-use water heater
This is the unglamorous part of decarbonisation! Previously, hot water for the site was provided by tanks, heated by boilers in big boiler room facilities for each separate block. This process was energy-inefficient and wasteful, as it heated large amounts of water whether it was needed or not. Over the past year we have been phasing out these hot water tanks and replacing them with point-of-use water heaters, which only heat water as it is needed. These heaters reduce wasted energy, and also free up spaces which previously housed tanks and boilers for storage. We will continue this work in the future.
Lighting
All of our new builds and refurbished facilities have been equipped with LED lighting, and over the past years we have been phasing out any remaining fluorescent tubes to replace them with energy-efficient units. They actually provide better quality light too! Many of our corridor lights are now linked to motion sensors as well, so they are not on unnecessarily, and the external lighting has been upgraded as well. Let there be light!
Recycling
We have always tried to recycle as much waste as possible, and this term we have increased the number of recycling bins on site to encourage pre-sorting of waste as it is thrown away.
The real battle, of course, is reducing the amount of waste we produce in the first place! There is much we can still do in this area, and students and staff are already moving forward with plans to use technology instead of paper, to reduce packaging waste, and to continue our battle against litter.
— Churchill Academy & Sixth Form (@ChurchillAcad) October 27, 2021
The green environment
We are lucky in our rural site, surrounded by trees, fields, orchards, and the Mendip Hills. We do all we can to preserve and enhance our green and pleasant site wherever possible. This includes a massive programme of tree planting across the site, including across our car parks and around the perimeter. We are also keen to encourage biodiversity, working with local partners to ensure the wildlife that shares our environment can continue to flourish.
Great to welcome the Ecologists from @kiergroup to school today to carry out their annual check of our Barn Owl tree box. pic.twitter.com/TauapSGmZ1
— Churchill Academy & Sixth Form (@ChurchillAcad) October 6, 2021
Student Leadership
The student-led Green Team has been operating in the Sixth Form for the past five years. Previously they have introduced reusable and recyclable coffee cups for the Common Room, used the “no power hour” to highlight energy usage, and redeveloped the pond area next to the Sixth Form Centre. This year, the Green Team has great plans – and they’re going whole school, to bring main school students on board too. Look out for further updates later this year!
Energy and CO2 impact so far
Our CO2 monitoring graph, with future projections
The efforts above have already had a significant impact on our CO2 emissions, which have been cut by half in the past five years. We know there is more to do if we are to achieve our ambition to be an environmentally sustainable institution – in particular, reducing our reliance on gas, and continuing to improve the efficiency of our site. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far – but we’re just getting started.
The Headteacher's Blog 